The world is a beautiful place, or sublime. It is always reaching towards ideals or falling away from them, into decay. We see both the beautiful and the sublime, our ideals and their imperfection, in the blossom of a flower, a city, a work of art, or a war. In the inspiration of hope or the triggers of fear we sense that all beauty is followed with decay, and out of decay arises all beauty (definition of ecosystem). Our idea of the planet is, in many ways, more perfect than the real thing.
It doesn’t take an Einstein to struggle with ideals and imperfections. Every one of us has dreams and failures; we all suffer and hope. True wisdom does not come from rocking wildly up and down between pleasure and pain or courage and fear, but in a balance between the extremes. There lies happiness.
If we are standing at the midpoint of a seesaw, we are most attuned and able to compensate for the changes which might chance to occur at either end. If we are at one extreme or the other, the adjustment necessary to rebalance takes a much larger effort. All of us have cultivated certain landscapes in our lives – marriages, careers, or hobbies – where we are near the midpoint, where our senses are finely tuned to the slightest changes that go on around us.
Any problem we approach in this way, by trying to get to the center of it, improves our sense of mastery, so to speak. Having gained some awareness of the midpoint, we are granted gifts. These gifts are not so much things, but awareness of the relationships between things. Our relationship is not to a thing, but to balance; our relationship to a friend, or a family, is not to a thing, but to a whole constellation of meaningful ideas. It is to qualia.